The Mask

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Hermione Granger had never liked movies. This surprised her 'friends'. She had a reason. Her whole life was some kind of pantomime. Why a pantomime? Because others ruled it. She was the person her audience wanted her to be. How could she like the subject that made a mockery of her life? Only between the hours of twelve a.m. to one a.m. was she truly herself.

She was destined to become the trophy wife of the war hero Ronald Weasley. The thought filled her with dread. It would be like committing incest with her brother.

Everyday she would walk to class, half the time reading. Her classmates would say good morning and putting on her frozen smile she would reply.

As she laughed with them and joked around she wondered how they couldn't see the truth. Could her laugh really sound real to them while it sounded so fake to her?

She would provide trivial comments and help them with their childish problems. Compared to them she felt so old, almost a million.

Couldn't they see the twinkles in her eyes was unshed tears? Couldn't they hear how her laugh was a different kind of mourning? A choked sob?

They teased her gently about been unsociable as she always had her head stuck in a book. Couldn't they see how this was her release? If they did they wouldn't be so careless… When she read books she felt sucked out of her own life into someone else's. She could mourn for them and feel their happiness… when she couldn't find her own. She could never find her own. She was empty.

They would wrap their arms around her shoulders and remark how pale she was. She would smile and laugh, never telling them how she stayed up at night, crying and mourning, till past one. How she would listen to her dorm-mates sleep around her, wishing she was one of them.

You're too skinny! They would say. She didn't like eating because eating meant socializing. She avoided meals, telling tales of headaches and other hurts.

When she was on her own she would read off her kindle- a gift from her mother. Her war-victim mother. She loved the beautiful romances that would never happen to someone like her.

If anyone asked her to say how her day was and she would make up some random stuff. It was easy- her days were clockwork.

She wasn't coping with the aftermath of the war- she could tell. She either felt nothing, felt like an empty space with no emotions or she felt too much, felt fiercely enough to want to end her misery.

After classes, she would lock herself in her Head Girl study and do homework. Once that was finished she would say she had studying as an excuse to be by herself. And read.

During dinnertime she would have another headache. She would read. At bedtime she would wait until her dorm-mates fell asleep and she would read on her kindle. In the late hours of night she would pull from under her pillow her release. Her razor.

In her private hours of the day between midnight and one a.m. she would perform the act that got her through the day. She would pull out her razor and gently slice her belly. Sometimes it was just little cuts, enough to see the scarlet drops bead along a slender line. Other times she would viciously stab and tear and her skin then watch, panting, as the blood ran slickly over her flesh before healing the cuts enough so that she wouldn't die of blood loss. She kept a small phial of blood replenishing potion close by.

Why did she do this? She often wondered.

She cut herself because it passed along a message to her. All humans have blood and all humans bleed. By cutting she proved that despite everything she was, despite the plastic surface that was molded, underneath was a human. A young woman. It proved to her she wasn't a robot, she wasn't some fictional character but she was as real as anyone else. That she was worth something to people other then a homework whore.

At one a.m. exactly she would put away the razor and use her saliva to wash away the blood and make sure the cuts were hidden. She would then lay down on her pillow and close her eyes. Sleep usually came by around two. And during that hour she would reflect. The Mask. She couldn't even call it her mask because it wasn't – someone else melded it. She felt as though she was living someone else's life but what could she do?

She couldn't drop the mask.